Data storage libraries are generally comprised of drive storage devices adapted to read and write data to and from media often archived within the libraries. Traditionally, tape media has been used in many of the mainstream storage libraries due to the relatively high storage capacity and data integrity robustness of tapes. As a consequence, a multi-billion dollar a year industry has been built around tape media. Due to innovations and rapid improvements in the general field of data storage technology, other types of storage media are beginning to compete in the tape storage arena. However, because of momentum generated by the tape industry, as well as certain persevering attributes of tape, the market has been reluctant to fully adopt the new technologies. For this reason, many new, non-tape storage technologies are being integrated with tape library systems instead of fully replacing them.
Among the new, non-tape storage technology solutions being integrated with tape library systems are disc drives. Disc drives are of a variety of random access memory devices that are especially able to handle high data throughputs with the capacity to store comparable amounts of data relative to tape cassettes. There are certain advantages and disadvantages to both tape media and disc drives, however. Disc drives are generally less robust and more expensive than tape media, but have high speed random data access whereas tape media accesses data in a linear fashion. Notably, present storage systems include software geared toward handling data in the linear fashion embodied by tapes, rather than the random access fashion embodied by disc drives.
In order to access (e.g., read, write, or manipulate) data on tape, data are fundamentally constructed in partitions that are encountered sequentially by a reader or writer, typically located in a storage drive device. User data, or data stored on behalf of a user, are generally partitioned as files which are further segmented into multiple records. Each data record starts with a header and ends with a trailer containing meta data, or information about the user data in the record. Meta data often contains information including identification of the header or trailer, version, meta data number, meta data length and record length, just to name one construct. The tape library system can locate certain positions on the tape in an efficient manner in both forward and reverse directions with the help of both the header and trailer meta data. These tape library systems rely on software architected specifically for tape media to locate particular data in files using meta data. Such software is typically incapable of accessing data stored on non-tape media, without modification.
The invention described herein is, therefore, generally directed to leveraging the benefits of non-tape media for use by systems and software that typically are specialized to work with tape media.